Trying to get into Cities: Skylines. Any tips?

[AidanA2828 3]

So, I played Simcity 2013 for a while. 500+ hours. I bought Cities: Skylines a while back and haven't played it or Simcity in a while. Never going back to Simcity after playing Cities, but does anyone have some tips for a new player?

[Cool_Z 1,547]

I have two tips.

Start prudent( do not buy anything not needed in the beginning).

Try to leave heavy traffic uninterrupted (for later in the game. Try to have big circulation roads separate from secondary and free from frequent stops).

[Koesj 659]

10 minutes ago, AidanA2828 said:

So, I played Simcity 2013 for a while. 500+ hours. I bought Cities: Skylines a while back and haven't played it or Simcity in a while. Never going back to Simcity after playing Cities, but does anyone have some tips for a new player?

Try out some stuff for yourself first to get used to the game, come back after you're couple hours in to vent, then start dabbling with some entry-level mods!

[AidanA2828 3]

23 minutes ago, Koesj said:

Try out some stuff for yourself first to get used to the game, come back after you're couple hours in to vent, then start dabbling with some entry-level mods!

Thanks. I'm gonna try that. Already got a city started. Do you have any mods you'd recommend?

[AidanA2828 3]

So far I've notice one thing: Power lines are hell to get right and get to look nice. I mean, my city looks terrible with power lines going everywhere!

[Cool_Z 1,547]

They're needed in the beginning, but it won't last too much.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

2 hours ago, AidanA2828 said:

So far I've notice one thing: Power lines are hell to get right and get to look nice. I mean, my city looks terrible with power lines going everywhere!

I made this little power supply unit for small developments especially because of what you're complaining about. Just plop a few of these until you can pick a good spot for a large plant or the neighborhood grows to becomes connected to the main power grid. If the town will always be out in the country away from the main city areas, just place enough of these units to a permanent spot. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=536804516

A few suggestions:

Be VERY picky when shopping on the workshop for assets. Many look good in the screenshots but are not so great in game. Look out for bad LODs (the building representatives when zoomed away from the main models) and look out for bad nightlights. But that's subjective to your taste.

DO NOT develop residential zones too big too fast or you will have deathwaves when that generation starts to die off around the same time.

Make your inner city train lines separate from the main lines going outside the map so you don't have cargo and tourist trains clogging up your commuters.

Have fun!

[AidanA2828 3]

49 minutes ago, Mr_Maison said:

I made this little power supply unit for small developments especially because of what you're complaining about. Just plop a few of these until you can pick a good spot for a large plant or the neighborhood grows to becomes connected to the main power grid. If the town will always be out in the country away from the main city areas, just place enough of these units to a permanent spot. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=536804516

A few suggestions:

Be VERY picky when shopping on the workshop for assets. Many look good in the screenshots but are not so great in game. Look out for bad LODs (the building representatives when zoomed away from the main models) and look out for bad nightlights. But that's subjective to your taste.

DO NOT develop residential zones too big too fast or you will have deathwaves when that generation starts to die off around the same time.

Make your inner city train lines separate from the main lines going outside the map so you don't have cargo and tourist trains clogging up your commuters.

Have fun!

Thanks. I'll have to try your mod out.

[AidanA2828 3]

So, status report. I've put over an hour on my city and I've attached a few photos. I built a highway with two one-way roads and built from that. My residential zone was a messup. I intended for the center of that roundabout to be the center of the residential zone, but it ended up as just a junction of the two halves of my city. Also, way to many intersections in that grid. My industrial zone disappointing me because I can't expand it up the hill. Don't really know what I'm gonna do with my commercial zone. I wanted to make that strip a main street, but it just kind of fizzled out. I'm going to try to fix that, though. My highway is another issue. I'm lost as to what to do with the end.

 

So, I think that Cities: Skylines is better than Simcity. As stated above, I don't like the power line system. It'd be great if I could have my power lines ran alongside my roads and not take up zoning space (like in Simcity). My bus system was hard to set up too. That might be due to my stupidity, but it took forever to figure out how to to make a  bus line.  I haven't even tried to get into the specialty buildings, specializations, or other things, but so far, I like the game.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

you might want to make a direct connection to the industrial zone from the highway. That road through that strip is gonna be a real bottleneck.

[AidanA2828 3]

27 minutes ago, Mr_Maison said:

you might want to make a direct connection to the industrial zone from the highway. That road through that strip is gonna be a real bottleneck.

Well, there's my use for that highway. I'm going to have to buy the territory to the right to expand the industrial zone.

[Ltw 401]

On 23-3-2016 at 11:41 PM, AidanA2828 said:

Well, there's my use for that highway. I'm going to have to buy the territory to the right to expand the industrial zone.

I agree with Mr_Maison on this point. Industrial zones cause a lot of traffic, which will cause problems. Another good advice is to look into districts, I don't know if you've already done that but that should help a lot. You can make several districts (like a commercial, residential and industrial district in this case) and you can switch on several policies in those districts. In this case it would be wise to connect the highway to the industrial zone and ban heavy traffic in your commercial district, this way heavy traffic will choose the highway instead of smaller roads. Furthermore it is really helpful to switch on big business benefactor, small business enthusiast and industrial space planning in the future (all in the city planning category), this will double the production/sales of industrial and commercial buildings which has a great impact on your tax-revenue. However, this will also cause more traffic or other problems such as not enough goods to sell, thus you have to make sure that you have enough industry/import to deal with that. Therefore I would wait for that for a little while but it is nice to keep that in mind

Next to that it is helpful to look at the resources map as well, in general specialized districts make more money than generic districts. Therefore it would be wise to look at the map and zone industrial districts at places where there is oil/ore/forests/fertile land. You can specialize them in the district tab. These specialized zones will deliver their goods to your own generic industrial zones first and after that those zones will export. This makes it cheaper and easier for the industrial zones to produce goods which gives you more tax revenue. You could also buy land based on the resources-map. In my opinion it isn't a big deal if the industrial zones are spread out, I have 6 industrial zones spread out in my city (three generic districts, one farmers-district, one for ore and one for oil). Those zones deal with a lot of traffic which is something to deal with at some point, but in the end the income is quite big, which makes it worth the trouble.

[omnivoreceo 54]

I'd recommend downloading a small city and just working with a functioning city before even trying to build your own. I think that if you played other simulators, you'll get the basic gist of how to build in Skylines, but I've found removing a lot of tedium from my playing and just diving into actually fixing a city is a lot more interesting, challenging and fun. It might be a good way to constrain all of the choices the game otherwise consigns to you. 

[Ichigo951 22]

What I've been doing mostly is looking at Google Maps and thinking "how can I simplify this but make it look real?". But, I've been playing for a bit, but I'm still new, so I wouldn't know if this applies for your experience level.

[skallben 21]

Get creative, have fun. Look around you IRL, and Google Maps as previous poster suggested. Get familiar with the basics.
Get on youtube and check what people create. Recommended: Strictoaster, Fluxtrance, Freshpopcorn, Keralis. And there are loads more.

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Consider your city as a container for two basic resources. People & goods.

* People work, shop, go for entertainment and tourism. Click someone and follow around to get a hint of how it works.
* Goods are imported or manufactured in your industries. Creates traffic that takes alot of space on your roads.

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Get a mod called "traffic report tool", make sure to get the updated version. Then you can click on any road or building and see incoming and outgoing traffic. Now you can understand the flow of people and goods in your city.

Separate your rail networks, don't run passenger and freight on same tracks. Train congestion is as bad as gridlock.
Don't be afraid of demolishing and redeveloping zones.

And again: Get creative, have fun!